As the sun sets on the summer season, I made one last getaway to a local island to enjoy the final moments of warm weather. While this small, remote island offers a chance to disconnect, it doesn't forsake the conveniences we are accustomed to in the process. Despite my lack of cash to hand, making a purchase from the small businesses at a rustic farmer’s market couldn’t have been easier — thanks to the vendors’ alternative mobile payment option.

Leveraging new devices for complex tasks that involve sensitive information or personal data demands consumer trust. The mobile payment adoption curve has been gradual for several reasons, one of which is the lack of trust, but recent news hints at the impressive connections that become possible once consumers put their trust in a service. PayPal recently announced several updates to its mobile phone application that make the app as relevant, complex, and functional as a mobile wallet. By winning the trust of a vast consumer base, PayPal is able to introduce more advanced features with the knowledge that consumers will seamlessly engage with the new offerings.

In fact, Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® data shows that US online adults trust PayPal more than any other financial institution to act as a mobile wallet platform:

For the past two weeks, I was on holiday with little access to the Internet. It wasn’t that I'd gone to the ends of the earth; I was, in fact, traveling through the South of England, but we just didn’t come across many places that had Wi-Fi access. During our holiday, I also started to notice that the Brits have a more restrained way of using their mobile phones in public. While I’m used to seeing people around me in the Netherlands checking their mobile whenever and wherever, I hardly saw anyone in the UK browsing on their mobile when in the company of others.

When I commented on this to my colleagues after my return, they attributed it to my rosy outlook due to my time off. So I looked at Forrester’s Technographics® data to compare US and UK smartphone users’ behaviors. Smartphone ownership in the UK isn’t that far behind that of the US: Our recent Forrester Research World Mobile Adoption Forecast, 2013 To 2018 (Global) shows that about 61% of US mobile subscribers use the mobile Internet compared with 49% of their UK peers — and we expect these numbers to grow to 75% and 70%, respectively, in 2018. More striking is our 2013 data that shows that usage of smartphones at home is comparable in both countries — but it’s the usage at restaurants and coffee shops that really differs:

At the beginning of 2013, approximately 153 million US online adults had health insurance coverage. While it serves the majority of US adults, the health insurance industry is unique in that only a minority of health insurance customers choose their health insurance provider directly. Forrester estimates that just 14% of US online adults — 25 million US adults — actively chose their health insurance provider in 2013.

However, with the onset of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as "Obamacare," many new customers will enter the healthcare market. While we don't know exactly what portion of uninsured US adults will follow the mandate that all US residents must obtain health insurance, there is a large pool of potential new customers.

In fact, Forrester’s Technographics® data shows that 13% of US online adults (23 million adults) reported having no health insurance at the beginning of 2013. Of these uninsured adults, 47% don't have health insurance because they can no longer afford personal coverage; 25% left the employer that provided their coverage; and 15% never had health coverage.

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Summer 2013 may be bringing about a renewed enthusiasm for surfing — and not only on the beach: Many consumers are turning to online video services to skim the waves of new content.

In Q3 2012, Forrester’s Technographics Data Insight showed that around one in ten US online adults had canceled their TV service in order to stream content exclusively from the Internet; those who did not cancel their programming cited their desire to channel surf as the primary reason for maintaining TV service. However, as online video evolves, consumers are finding that the Internet enables an equivalent channel-surfing experience. Participants in our ConsumerVoices online community say they look to Netflix to discover new entertainment content rather than to simply stream a specific show:

“Every time I use Netflix, it is to discover what is on. I never go on there at certain times looking for specific shows. I like having all their movies and shows available to me when I want it.”

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I recently published a report on The European eCommerce Landscape; it shows that more than two-thirds of European online consumers are shopping online, but there are big differences among the different countries. The top categories bought online are travel, clothing and accessories, leisure and entertainment, and consumer electronics. Forrester’s European Technographics® data also reveals that European consumers increasingly prefer the Internet to high-street shops for purchases of music, computer software, event tickets, and videos:

In recent years, the Internet has become the leading channel for media products. In 2012, more European online consumers bought videos/DVDs, music, event tickets, and computer software online than offline. These online media purchases fall into two categories:

We live in a world filled with technology-empowered consumers who have access to more information on brands than ever before. Armed with this information, they are telling brands where, when, and how they want to engage. This new world has sent marketers and the brand’s they support into a tailspin — they are losing control of their brand message and are losing trust with consumers. My colleagues Tracy Stokes, Chelsea Hammond, and I have developed a framework that helps marketers stop their free fall and chart a new course for their brand to win mindshare and market share in this new world. We call it the TRUE Brand Compass Framework.

In this framework, we take the stance that for marketers to succeed in building a 21st century brand, they need to focus on a new set of metrics that capture brand resonance. Professor Kevin Lane Keller perfectly states what brand resonance is: “where customers feel a connection or sense of community with the brand and they would miss it if it went away.” In our research and advanced analytics on brand resonance, we identified four key dimensions that each significantly influence brand resonance. These four dimensions are TRUE: trusted, remarkable, unmistakable, and essential.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the value of 16 billion pictures? According to Instagram, whose 130 million active users had shared this number of photos as of June 2013, the answer is “priceless.” Individuals’ enthusiasm for capturing and sharing photos shapes our media consumption as much as it does our co-creative potential; with the launch of its video capability, Instagram’s platform may become entwined with our social futures.

Online photo and video sharing continues to gain momentum as an emerging method of communication. Internationally, Instagram plays the role of news channel by turning local perspectives into global awareness. In fact, the role of media-sharing sharing technology is so significant that the Chicago Sun Times Newspaper laid off all full-time photographers, including a Pulitzer Prize winner, with the intention of moving toward more online video provision.

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Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the Insight Innovation Exchange conference in Philadelphia. There were many vendors that offered solutions to many common challenges that market researchers face. One common theme I noticed was the challenge for market researchers to make sense of big data. Yes, big data has become something of a buzzword, but consumers are creating a lot more data and market researchers can thrive if they embrace it.

For some time now, Forrester has been writing about the importance of incorporating behavioral tracking insights to marketer researchers’ research mix. Don’t get me wrong — survey research is and will continue to be incredibly important for companies to gain insights on consumers. A survey can capture a variety of consumer behaviors, sentiments, and attitudes. In one survey, marketers can assess their market share and find out the profile of their customers and what they want. And survey research can help provide insight into the “why” — the reasoning behind the choices that consumers make — something that is not possible with behavioral data. However, survey research cannot detail granular activities due to respondent recall. Enter big data, and with it many possibilities for behavioral tracking. Yes, this is nothing new for customer intelligence professionals, who analyze customer transactions, online web tracking, and other consumer behaviors. But by combining survey and behavioral data, marketers get the best of both worlds: They get consumer profiles and psychographics, brand health metrics, and a detailed record of the actions that those consumers actually do.

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We find comfort in the familiar — and when it comes to our technology preferences, it's no different. In a recent report by my colleague Michael O'Grady he explored the key decision-making factors that drive tablet adoption among consumers. While shopper demographics and needs precipitate tablet purchases in a variety of ways, ultimate brand selection depends, perhaps, on even subtler characteristics. Certainly, there are those memorable advertising campaigns, such as the recent Windows 8 commercial that parodies Apple iPads, which influence our perception of tablet brands. However, less obvious factors such as previous technology ownership and operating system familiarity may direct our tablet purchasing behavior.

Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® data reveals that consumers tend to adopt tablet devices that run on the same operating system as their smartphone. Specifically, we find that US online consumers owning Android, iOS, and Windows smartphones seek out consistent operating systems on their tablet:

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With almost 80% of homes in the EU-7 (France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and UK) having online access in 2013, Internet connections are a standard household component today in Western Europe. And as users demand faster connections to consume rich media content across multiple devices, broadband connectivity is quickly becoming the norm. The Forrester Research Online Access Forecast — Broadband, 2012 To 2017 (EU-7) shows that 72% of all EU-7 households had a DSL, cable, or fiber broadband subscription in 2012, well above the global average. But not all European countries show the same level of adoption. Within this group of seven, we can split the countries into three distinct groups of relative broadband development and adoption:

Advanced adopters. The Netherlands and Sweden lead the pack in terms of both broadband penetration and the share of broadband users opting for high-speed connections. Early and robust deployment of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks and strong cable offerings will encourage most consumers to shift away from slower connections, giving cable and fiber more than a 60% share of the home broadband market by 2017. Sweden in particular has one of the world’s strongest high-speed Internet markets today, with more than a quarter of all households enjoying a fiber connection.